Monthly Archives: April 2014

I have noticed a few reports that Lightning 2.6.4 is not working with the Debian variant of Thunderbird, called Icedove. Together with one of our users (thanks Arie!) this was reported to the Debian package maintainers.

There are slight differences in how Icedove and Thunderbird are compiled, the result is that the Linux symbol versions required are different. The maintainers are working on fixing this, in the meanwhile all you need to do is make sure you are using only one source for the packages:

If you are using Thunderbird from mozilla.org, make sure you are using Lightning from addons.mozilla.org. You can install it into /opt if you don’t want to conflict with your Debian packaging system.

Unfortunately, this difference in compilation has cost us some negative reviews. If everything is working for you or this post has helped you to use the right versions, please show some love and write a review ♥.

I am particularly excited to announce that this year the Calendar Project has received two slots in Google Summer of Code 2014. Both projects target our backend code. This means users won’t have a chance to complain about user interface changes and instead will be blown away by performance and interoperability improvements.

I would like to take a few minutes to introduce our awesome new students to the community, please join me in giving them a warm welcome!

Reid Anderson: Improve Calendar Provider Backends

This project is about performance and stability for our calendar storage. Here is what Reid has to say:

I have been a student at the University of Minnesota since 2012 studying Chemistry and Computer Science. Outside of the classroom, I spend a lot of my time both watching and playing a variety of sports. I also enjoy reading, talking to friends, or playing a quick game of Civilization. I heard about Google Summer of Code before I entered college, and participating in the program had always been a goal of mine.

I was introduced to the Mozilla community when I started submitting patches to Songbird, a desktop media manager built on the Mozilla framework. Throughout the entire community I saw a consistent message of an open web powered by open technology and open software. This is something that I am excited to be a part of, and I am looking forward to contributing. My project is to improve the cached mode for online calendar providers to the point where it can be used as the default setting. This should allow Lightning to function effectively in an offline environment, while also bringing significant performance improvements. Hopefully these will be a useful contributions to the community, and I’m looking forward to getting started.

Isn’t that wonderful? I’m particularly excited about the performance improvements this will bring. Further project updates will be done on his blog and we will of course be posting major updates here too.

Malintha Fernando: Update Invitations to the latest Specification

This project will not only improve our invitations support, it will also guard us from future regressions through more tests. Here is an excerpt from Malintha’s blog post:

My name is Malintha Fernando and I am a student developer from Sri Lanka, currently studying at University of Moratuwa. I started contributing to Mozilla some months back (Still got a lot to learn) as my first contribution in open source and glad to be a part of the Lightning project in GSoC 2014.

The objective of this project is to improve Lightning’s scheduling system by updating the available features to the latest RFC specifications. As we know most of the Lightning’s implementation were done referring to the draft version 4 of the RFC 6638, there are some features lagging behind from the final RFC document.

Do you remember the mess we had when 2.6.x was released? At least one of the bugs we had to fix quickly was a regression in the invitations code. With Malintha’s help this won’t happen again!Whats next?According to Google, we are currently in the “Community Bonding Period”. This means we have a little time to set things up and make preparations. Coding officially begins on May 19th. You can follow progress on the projects as mentioned above, I will also blog about major updates here as we get closer to completion. Lets have some fun with this and continue to make Lightning better. Its about time!